This invention relates generally to encryption techniques and, more specifically, relates to homomorphic encryption techniques.
This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Acronyms that appear in the text or drawings are defined below, prior to the claims.
In his breakthrough result, Gentry demonstrated that fully-homomorphic encryption was theoretically possible, assuming the hardness of some problems in integer lattices. See [13] below, in a section entitled “References”. A reference or references is or are indicted by a number within square brackets or multiple numbers within square brackets, respectively. Since then, many different improvements have been made, for example authors have proposed new variants, improved efficiency, suggested other hardness assumptions, and the like. Some of these works were accompanied by implementation, but all the implementations so far were either “proofs of concept” that can compute only one basic operation at a time (e.g., at great cost), or special-purpose implementations limited to evaluating very simple functions. See [26, 14, 8, 27, 19, 9].